Windsor Conference on the Environment

Windsor Conference on the Environment – Many Heavens: One Earth by the Bishop of London

I was breasting a hill near to the coast. When I reached the summit and saw the fields stretched out below and a village nestling in a hollow and beyond, the sea, such a weight of glory overwhelmed me that I was forced to my knees. I was being addressed and was a part of the glory and I broke into spontaneous praise.

One of the priests of the English Church, Thomas Traherne, declared that “You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars …. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold and kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.”

Genuine religion arises from Annunciation, being addressed by the Other, rather than making an idol of some projected idea or emotion of our own. Adam where are you? Abraham leave your household gods and begin your journey to a land you do not know. Moses, put off your shoes, this is holy ground. He was addressed from the bush which burned but was not consumed. The boy Samuel called when the rumour of God was very faint. Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee. The bible is full of annunciations. God speaks through His Word and through his book of nature.

I believe that we are being addressed in our generation by the glory and the distress of the earth.

The Bible sets the human story and the sacrifice of Christ against a huge cosmic canvas.

In our own day we have been given a vivid account of the cosmic drama by contemporary science. We seem to be involved in a five act drama. In a series of irreversible transformations the history of the universe has unfolded from its beginnings about 13.7 billion years ago. Act I is the galactic story. Act II is the formation of planet Earth just far enough away from our sun to avoid frying and not so far as to become a sterile rock. Act III is the story of the birth of life on Earth; with Act IV concerned with the story of homo sapiens as we emerged some 160,000 years ago from Africa to colonise the globe.

The evolutionary story has a material and physical aspect but also a psycho-spiritual aspect. We are, as the Bible and Darwin agree, creatures of the dust – star-dust in fact; we are participants in a web of life; humans are the universe reflecting on and celebrating life in conscious self-awareness.

The problem is that the knowledge which has delivered such great power over the earth has been generated from an “objective” way of observing the world which has tended to divorce us from a sense of inner connectedness with nature. Dominance has been substituted for interconnectedness and we have come to see the earth in a god-forsaken way as a mere theatre for human willing and exploitation, with a diminished awareness that our well-being is involved in the well-being of the earth.

Act V of our five act drama is just beginning and it will decide whether humanity is yet another dead end in the unfolding story of life or whether promise will predominate and peril will be surmounted. The President of the Royal Society recently published a book about the prospects for the human race worryingly entitled “Our Final Century” – without a question mark – although he has ascribed this to a publisher’s error.

Shall we develop the wisdom to channel the power we have acquired from the scientific knowledge and discoveries of the 20th century? Where indeed, to quote T.S.Eliot, is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge and the knowledge we have lost in information?

In the book of Revelation, great multitudes, from all nations and kindreds, people and tongues, stand before the throne and cry out “Salvation/deliverance belongs to God”. Too often we have seen salvation exclusively in terms of individuals. That is, of course, vital; but the Bible shows us the individual person realistically as someone always involved in relationships with other human beings and with the world of nature. We can perish in a world and a human community that is atomised; but we are saved together.

It is especially good to be involved in an initiative like Many Heavens: One Earth which builds unity between faiths as we look together in the same direction at a common human challenge.

At the end of the Divine Comedy, Dante describes his vision of divine reality – “all the scattered leaves of the universe bound by love in one volume”.

 

Leo the Great

St. Leo the Great was born in Tuscany. As deacon, he was dispatched to Gaul as a mediator by Emperor Valentinian III. He reigned as Pope between 440 and 461. He persuaded Emperor Valentinian to recognize the primacy of the Bishop of Rome in an edict in 445. The doctrine of the Incarnation was formed by him in a letter to the Patriarch of Constantinople, who had already condemned Eutyches. At the Council of Chalcedon this same letter was confirmed as the expression of Catholic Faith concerning the Person of Christ.

All secular historical treatises eulogize his efforts during the upheaval of the fifth century barbarian invasion. His encounter with Attila the Hun, at the very gates of Rome persuading him to turn back, remains a historical memorial to his great eloquence. When the Vandals under Genseric occupied the city of Rome, he persuaded the invaders to desist from pillaging the city and harming its inhabitants. He died in 461, leaving many letters and writings of great historical value. His feast day is November 10th.

 

Go Deeper – the search for wisdom

I set out my pilgrimage , hoping to learn how to conjoin seeing and feeling, to conjoin knowing and loving – this conjoining is what I am going to call ‘’wisdom’. It is what I find in the places I visit, in the things I experience there, in the guises in which I meet the figure of Wisdom. I have come to believe there has been a deep-going separation in our times between knowing and loving, a split  in the human spirit, between seeing and feeling too, a split that reaches thus into sense as well, between the two realms that Kant speaks of, ‘’the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’’. I have gradually passed in my own life from the one realm to the other; I have gone from living in my mind to living in my heart. That has led me into the darkness of my own heart, divided between the way I am taking in life and the way I have not taken, and on deeper into the darkness  of the human heart as such, the heart’s longing in conflict with human misery. Now I think I have to go deeper still, to the place ‘’in my heart where my soul dwells’’.

 From the Preface of  The House of Wisdom by John S. Dunne

University of Notre Dame Press 1993

 

Remembrance

The following poem was written in 1999 in connection with the conflict in Kosovo. In 2005 the author decided that it was not a good idea to have written the poem in such a negative form, soit was re-wrote it as There will be peace. Readers can choose which version they prefer. The new version follows the old.

There will be no peace:

till attitudes change; till self-interest is seen as part of common interest; till old wrongs, old scores, old mistakes      are deleted from the account; till the aim becomes co-operation and mutual benefit      rather than revenge or seizing maximum personal or group gain; till justice and equality before the law      become the basis of government; till basic freedoms exist; till leaders – political, religious, educational – and the police and media      wholeheartedly embrace the concepts of justice, equality, freedom, tolerance, and reconciliation as a basis for renewal; till parents teach their children new ways to think about people. There will be no peace:            till enemies become fellow human beings.  David Roberts 22 July 1999   There will be peace: when attitudes change; when self-interest is seen as part of common interest; when old wrongs, old scores, old mistakes      are deleted from the account; when the aim becomes co-operation and mutual benefit      rather than revenge or seizing maximum personal or group gain; when justice and equality before the law      become the basis of government; when basic freedoms exist; when leaders – political, religious, educational – and the police and media      wholeheartedly embrace the concepts of justice, equality, freedom, tolerance, and reconciliation as a basis for renewal; when parents teach their children new ways to think about people. There will be peace:            when enemies become fellow human beings.  David Roberts 2005 Prayer for Remembrance Day For those who were killed in battle, For those who gave up their lives to save others For those who fought because they were forced to, For those who died standing up for a just cause For those who said war was wrong, For those who tried to make the peace For those who prayed when others had no time to pray       For those creatures who needlessly die For those trees that needlessly are slaughtered For all of mankind      let us quietly pray:     May your God hold them in peace May Love flow over the Earth and cleanse us all This day and for always.

 

Where is true religion to be found?

 

It may indeed be phantasy, when I

 Essay to draw from all created things

Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings ;

And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie Lessons of love and earnest piety.

So let it be ; and if the wide world rings

In mock of this belief, it brings

Nor fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity.

So will I build my altar in the fields,

 And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,

And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields

Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee…

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

Rain

Rain

The monotone of the rain is beautiful,
And the sudden rise and slow relapse
Of the long multitudinous rain.

The sun on the hills is beautiful,
Or a captured sunset sea-flung,
Bannered with fire and gold.

A face I know is beautiful–
With fire and gold of sky and sea,
And the peace of long warm rain.

 

Carl Sandburg, Monotone

 

in a different light?

towering of shadows of clouds

 

From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom of the well where the moon lives,
can you pull me

into December? a lowland
of space, perception of space
towering of shadows of clouds blown upon
clouds over new ground, new made
under heavy December footsteps? the only
way to live?

The black moon turns away, its work done.
A tenderness, unspoken autumn.
We are faithful only to the imagination.
What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.
What holds you to what you see of me is
that grasp alone.

 

From Denise Levertov, Everything that acts is actual.

 

 

Richard Hooker

Richard Hooker was born in March 1554 in Exeter.

He was educated in Exeter until he was sent, with Bishop Jewel as his patron, to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He graduated MA in 1577, and became a fellow of the college in the same year.

He became assistant professor of Hebrew at the University, and took holy orders, becoming a clergyman in the Church of England in 1581. Hooker was Master of the Temple (i.e. Dean of the Law School) in 1585-1591. Thereafter he lived in London and then at Boscombe, Wiltshire. He died at Bishopsbourne, in Kent, where he had become vicar.
        Hooker’s masterpiece is a long work in eight books called Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The first four books were published together in 1593, the fifth was published in 1597, and the rest appeared after his death. Although the last three volumes were Hooker’s work, they seem to have been heavily edited. The work represents one of the most distinguished examples of Elizabethan literature. King James I is quoted by Izaak Walton, Hooker’s biographer, as saying, “I observe there is in Mr. Hooker no affected language; but a grave, comprehensive, clear manifestation of reason, and that backed with the authority of the Scriptures, the fathers and schoolmen, and with all law both sacred and civil.”

 

What future for Anglicanism?

I am no scholar of Church history or skilled commentator on the Church. The conversations that continue over the recent action of Rome offering a ‘home’ to Anglicans remain divisive and distracting.

While fellow priests consider their position, spent inordinate amounts of time on the internert making judgements about other positions the Church is damaged by this distracting  thirst for power – we are all diminished by the divisions that have emerged.  We spend far too much time talking to ourselves, and only taking notice of those who agree with us (I am not excused from this accusation either!) but, above all are not honest about our motivations.

The Church is in decline. Both Rome and Canterbury see the tide ebbing away! Faced with these fundamental challenges of  death – how oddly we respond! I have been much challenged by this article in last weeks Guardian by Hans Kung…… read on and as you read ask what this means for you!

 

 

After Pope Benedict XVI’s offences against the Jews and the Muslims, Protestants and reform-oriented Catholics, it is now the turn of the Anglican communion, which encompasses some 77 million members and is the third largest Christian confession after the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox churches. Having brought back the extreme anti-reformist faction of the Pius X fraternity into the fold, Pope Benedict now hopes to fill up the dwindling ranks of the Catholic church with Anglicans sympathetic to Rome. Their conversion to the Catholic church is supposed to be made easier: Anglican priests and bishops shall be allowed to retain their standing, even when married. Traditionalists of the churches, unite! Under the cupola of St Peter’s! The Fisher of Men is angling in waters of the extreme religious right.

This Roman action is a dramatic change of course: steering away from the well-proven ecumenical strategy of eye-level dialogue and honest understanding; steering towards an un-ecumenical luring away of Anglican priests, even dispensing with medieval celibacy law to enable them to come back to Rome under the lordship of the pope. Clearly, the well-meaning Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was no match for cunning Vatican diplomacy. In his cosying up with the Vatican, he evidently did not recognise the consequences. Otherwise he would not have put his signature to the downplaying communique of the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. Can it be that those caught in the Roman dragnet do not see that they will never be more than second-class priests in the Roman church, that other Catholics are not meant to take part in their liturgical celebrations?

Ironically, this communique impudently invokes the truly ecumenical documents of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission, which were worked out in laborious negotiations between the Roman Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Anglican Lambeth conference: documents on the Eucharist (1971), on church office and ordination (1973), and on authority in the church (1976/81). People in the know, however, recognise that these three documents, subscribed to by both sides at that time, aimed not at recruitment, but rather at reconciliation. These documents of honest reconciliation provide the basis for a recognition of Anglican orders, which Pope Leo XIII, back in 1896, with anything but convincing arguments, had declared invalid. But from the validity of Anglican orders follows the validity of Anglican celebrations of the Eucharist. And so mutual Eucharistic hospitality would be possible; in fact, intercommunion. A slow process of growing together of Catholics and Anglicans would have been the consequence.

However, the Vatican Congregation on the Doctrine of the Faith quickly made sure that these documents of reconciliation disappeared in the dungeons of the Vatican. That’s called “shelving”. At the time, a confidential press release out of the Vatican cited “too much Küng theology” in them – in other words, a theological basis for a rapprochement between the churches of Rome and Canterbury.

As I wrote in 1967, “a resumption of ecclesial community between the Catholic church and the Anglican church” would be possible, when “the Church of England, on the one side, shall be given the guarantee that its current autochthonous and autonomous church order under the Primate of Canterbury will be preserved fully” and when, “on the other side, the Church of England shall recognise the existence of a pastoral primacy of Petrine ministry as the supreme authority for mediation and arbitration between the churches.” “In this way,” I expressed my hopes then, “out of the Roman imperium might emerge a Catholic commonwealth.”

But Pope Benedict is set upon restoring the Roman imperium. He makes no concessions to the Anglican communion. On the contrary, he wants to preserve the medieval, centralistic Roman system for all ages – even if this makes impossible the reconciliation of the Christian churches in fundamental questions. Evidently, the papal primacy – which Pope Paul VI admitted was the greatest stumbling block to the unity of the churches – does not function as the “rock of unity”. The old-fashioned call for a “return to Rome” raises its ugly head again, this time through the conversion particularly of the priests, if possible, en masse. In Rome, one speaks of a half-million Anglicans and 20 to 30 bishops. And what about the remaining 76 million? This is a strategy whose failure has been demonstrated in past centuries and which, at best, might lead to the founding of a “uniate” Anglican “mini-church” in the form of a personal prelature, not a territorial diocese. But what are the consequences of this strategy already today?

First, a further weakening of the Anglican church. In the Vatican, opponents of ecumenism rejoice over the conservative influx. In the Anglican church, liberals rejoice over the departure of the catholicising troublemakers. For the Anglican church, this split means further corrosion. It is already suffering from the consequences of the heedless and unnecessary election of an avowed gay priest as bishop in the US, an event that split his own diocese and the whole Anglican communion. This friction has been enhanced by the ambivalent attitude of the church’s leadership with respect to homosexual partnerships. Many Anglicans would accept a civil registration of such couples with wide-ranging legal consequences, for instance in inheritance law, and would even accept an ecclesiastical blessing for them, but they would not accept a “marriage” in the traditional sense reserved for partnerships between a man and a woman, nor would they accept a right to adoption for such couples.

Second, the widespread disturbance of the Anglican faithful. The departure of Anglican priests and their re-ordination in the Catholic church raises grave questions for many Anglicans: are Anglican priests validly ordained? Should the faithful together with their pastor convert to the Catholic church?

 

Third, the irritation of the Catholic clergy and laity. Discontent over the ongoing resistance to reform is spreading to even the most faithful members of the Catholic church. Since the Second Vatican Council in the 60s, many episcopal conferences, pastors and believers have been calling for the abolition of the medieval prohibition of marriage for priests, a prohibition which, in the last few decades, has deprived almost half of our parishes of their own pastor. Time and again, the reformers have run into Ratzinger’s stubborn, uncomprehending intransigence. And now these Catholic priests are expected to tolerate married, convert priests alongside themselves. When they want themselves to marry, should they first turn Anglican, and then return to the church?

Just as we have seen over many centuries – in the east-west schism of the 11th century, in the 16th century Reformation and in the First Vatican Council of the 19th century – the Roman thirst for power divides Christianity and damages its own church. It is a tragedy.

 

Hans Kung    Tuesday 27 October 2009 (www.guardian.co.uk)

 

All Saints

 

Father, all-powerful and ever-living God, today we rejoice in the holy men and women of every time and place. May their prayers bring us your forgiveness and love. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, Who live and reigns with you and Holy Spirit One God, forever and ever, Amen.

 

O Almighty God, who have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those indescribable joys which you have prepared for those who truly love you: through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting.